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From Copernicus to Darwin, to current-day thinkers, scientists have always promoted theories and unveiled discoveries that challenge everything society holds dear; ideas with both positive and dire consequences. Many thoughts that resonate today are dangerous not because they are assumed to be false, but because they might turn out to be true. What do the world's leading scientists and thinkers consider to be their most dangerous idea? Through the leading online forum Edge (www.edge.org), the call went out, and this compelling and easily digestible volume collects the answers. From using medication to permanently alter our personalities to contemplating a universe in which we are utterly alone, to the idea that the universe might be fundamentally inexplicable, What Is Your Dangerous Idea? takes an unflinching look at the daring, breathtaking, sometimes terrifying thoughts that could forever alter our world and the way we live in it.

Richard Dawkins writes about such topics as DNA and genetic engineering, virtual reality, astronomy, and evolution. Dawkins was educated at Oxford University and taught zoology at the University of California and Oxford University, holding the position of the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He is a member of the International Academy of Humanism. Dawkins' books include The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, and Climbing Mount Improbable. His book, entitled The God Delusion, shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children. Dawkins supports his points with historical and contemporary evidence. His title An Appetitie for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2013.

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born U.S. experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker is the author of several non-fiction bestsellers including: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007). and The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsï¿½, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

Preface: The Edge Question

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Contributors

We Have No Souls

The Rejection of Soul

The Evolution of Evil

The Differences Between Humans and Nonhumans Are Quantitative, Not Qualitative

Groups of People May Differ Genetically in Their Average Talents and Temperaments

The Genetic Basis of Human Behavior

Marionettes on Genetic Strings

Francis Crick's Dangerous Idea

Being Alone in the Universe

Life as an Agent of Energy Dispersal

We Are Entirely Alone

Science May Be Running Out of Control

Why I Hope the Standard Model Is Wrong About Why There Is More Matter Than Antimatter

The Idea That We Understand Plutonium

The Idea That We Should All Share Our Most Dangerous Ideas

The Idea That Ideas Can Be Dangerous

The Fight Against Global Warming Is Lost

Think Outside the Kyoto Box

Our Planet Is Not in Peril

The Effect of Art Can't Be Controlled or Anticipated

A "Grand Narrative"

Our Universal Moral Grammar's Immunity to Religion

Bertrand Russell's Dangerous Idea

Hodgepodge Morality

We Will Understand the Origin of Life Within the Next Five Years

Understanding Molecular Biology Without Discovering the Origins of Life

The Problem with Super Mirrors

Cyberdisinhibition

Brains Cannot Become Minds Without Bodies

What Are People Well Informed About in the Information Age?

More Anonymity Is Good

A New Golden Age of Medicine

Using Medications to Change Personality

Drugs May Change the Patterns of Human Love

A Marriage Option for All

Choosing the Sex of One's Child

The Idea of Ideas

The Human Brain Will Never Understand the Universe

The World May Be Fundamentally Inexplicable

The "Landscape"

Seeing Darwin in the Light of Einstein; Seeing Einstein in the Light of Darwin

The Multiverse

What Twentieth-Century Physics Says About the World Might Be True

It's a Matter of Time

A Radical Re-evaluation of the Character of Time

It's OK Not to Know Everything

The End of Insight

When Will the Internet Become Aware of Itself?

Democratizing Access to the Means of Invention

Mind Is a Universally Distributed Quality

The Forbidden Fruit Intuition

The Posterior Probability of Any Particular God Is Pretty Small

Science Must Destroy Religion

The Self Is a Conceptual Chimera

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Science as Just Another Religion

This Is All There Is

A Science of the Divine?

Science Will Never Silence God

Religion Is the Hope That Is Missing in Science

Myths and Fairy Tales Are Not True

Parental Licensure

Zero Parental Influence

The Focus on Emotional Intelligence

A Cacophony of "Controversy"

Applied History

Tribal Peoples Often Damage Their Environments and Make War

Nothing

Everything Is Pointless

There Aren't Enough Minds to House the Population Explosion of Memes

Unspeakable Ideas

Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an All-Too-Practical Sense

Navigating by New Scientific Principles

A Political System Based on Empathy

Social Relativity

There Is Something New Under the Sun -Us

A Spoon Is Like a Headache

Projection of the Longevity Curve

The Near-Term Inevitability of Radical Life Extension and Expansion

The Domestication of Biotechnology

Public Engagement in Science and Technology

Suppose Faulkner Was Right?

What If the Unknown Becomes Known and Is Not Replaced with a New Unknown?

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